Guy Pearce wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso

On February 28, 2012, four months before Prometheus reached theaters, a video appeared online of a man named Peter Weyland giving a TED talk. The date stamped on it was 2023. Weyland is not real. He is the founder of the corporation that will one day send a ship to the edge of the galaxy, and he is played by Guy Pearce, who at the time was forty-four and looked it. On the stage, in a glen-plaid suit, Weyland is sleek and certain and young.

That is the first lie the movie tells you about him.

The Peter Weyland of the actual film is dying. Pearce sat for five hours of old-age makeup to play him, and studied the way elderly people move, because the prosthetics could give him the face but not the body. The young man on the TED stage and the withered man revealed later, in a spacesuit, going to beg the creators of humanity for more life, are the same person separated by decades the audience never sees. Weyland funded a trillion-dollar expedition for one reason. He refuses to believe his money cannot buy him time.

The watch is where it gets slippery. A watch-spotting channel that catalogued the timepieces of the Alien films identifies the one on Weyland's wrist during his briefing as a gold Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, and no one has produced a better identification or a competing one. It is the only source there is. I went looking through the stills for the watch myself and could not find it: in the TED footage his cuff sits over the wrist, and by the time he is old he is sealed inside a suit. So call it likely rather than certain.

If it is the Reverso, the choice is almost too neat. Jaeger-LeCoultre built the Reverso in 1931 for British army officers playing polo in India, who kept shattering their watch crystals and wanted a case they could flip face-down for protection. The watch has, in other words, two faces: the dial it shows the world, and the blank metal back it turns outward when the dial needs hiding. Weyland is a man with two faces too. The one he projects, ageless and assured, on a stage in a year that has not happened yet. And the one underneath, which is running out of time.